SIL Electronic Working Papers 2004-001

Mamaindé tone: an OT account of plateauing, floating tones, and toneless morphemes in an Amazonian language

Author

Eberhard, David

Abstract

This paper describes the tone system of the Mamainde language. Sections dealing with stress and intonation show how these differ from tone. It is pointed out, however, that stress and tone in this language are both based upon the mora and the notion of syllable weight. This analysis has been able to improve on previous studies by reducing the tone system to just a H and L, without resorting to contour tones.

The bulk of the paper deals with an interesting tone sandhi evident on some Mamainde verbs, where specific HLH sequences are realized as HHH (also known as plateauing). The NoTrough constraint is proposed, which restricts HLH sequences in certain situations from being present in the output.

A few other examples of tone sandhi are also dealt with. The negative construction requires constraints on floating tones, and nouns require a toneless syllable. The Mamainde tone system also makes reference to morphology, showing how morphology and prosody are connected in this language.